The Disney Treasure – the brand’s sixth and newest cruise ship – is on its maiden voyage that hit the high seas on December 21, 2024. And with that, around 4,000 guests are experiencing not only a state-of-the-art vessel but one that emphasizes immersion within Disney’s historic franchises.
It translates some of the most iconic theme park attractions from Disneyland and Disney World to a cruise ship in a way that puts you in the middle of the action. Case in point: The Haunted Mansion is one of the most beloved attractions Disney has ever created, so much so that there are three of them: the original at Disneyland, Disney World, and Tokyo Disneyland.
So, when tasked with bringing that icon to the Disney Treasure, the Disney Imagineers chose to innovate and create a state-of-the-art experience in the form of the Haunted Mansion Parlor. It features countless eerie portraits, and you might even get a glimpse of the ‘hitchhiking ghosts,’ but centered in the space is a Ghost Fish Aquarium – yes, as cool as it sounds and looks in the images above and below. And while the parlor hints it’s a bar, it’s also a full-fledged attraction.
TechRadar spoke with Daniel Joseph, Executive Illusions & Effects for Walt Disney Imagineering, to unpack how the Haunted Mansion Parlor came to be. The Parlor took about five years from concept to rollout aboard the Treasure. But it took many years before that, as the Ghost Fish Aquarium originally debuted as an idea in the 1965 Disneyland Ten-centennial Special. Disney Imagineer Rolly Crump created it and was responsible for many other elements in Disneyland’s Haunted Mansion.
It didn’t necessarily come together at the time as “they didn’t really find a proper method, technique, or technology to do it because it really needed to look real,” explained Joseph. “So fast forward 50 years or so to when we’re brainstorming this all, it was kind of the perfect storm.”
Not only did a Ghost Fish Aquarium fit the next chapter of the Haunted Mansion, but Joseph and the team at Imagineering “discovered a new technique and used some new technologies that are out there to make it happen.” It not only pays homage to Rolly Crump, but Disney debuted a new kind of illusion on the ship.
Like any magician, Joseph held the tech powering it close but revealed, “There’s nothing like this in any land-based themed park that’s out there. It’s really, from a technology standpoint, only visible in our Mansion Parlor.”
To create the effect of the Ghost Fish Aquarium, which has skeletons of fish swimming around, Joseph explained, “Using different material sciences and things like that, learning how light and liquid kind of refract and work together, was a big breakthrough in creating the illusion.”
So yes, there is liquid inside the Ghost Fish Aquarium, but much like Disney Imagineering’s most epic creations, you won’t see the tech or how it’s done, regardless of where you are.
“We can’t control guests’ point of view like we do in the Haunted Mansion, where we’re tipping you in different directions to look at the scenery and our different scenes, and also you’re at a certain distance and all that stuff it, whereas in the Haunted Mansion parlor, you can go in and go right up to the stuff, it’s kind of close up magic,” explained Joseph.
With the Ghost Fish Aquarium, he noted, “You’ll literally probably have little kids pushing their noses up to it and looking up and down, and just as I did as a kid, riding the mansion and turning my head around to see how everything worked.” So one of the most significant criteria to hit was that you can’t see the tech behind it and that “they can be scrutinized in the round.” Simply, “they just see kind of the magic and the spirited results of it.”
Like the portraits in the Haunted Mansion’s stretching room, there are ‘change portraits’ in the Haunted Mansion Parlor. Joseph noted you can go right up to them and “see brush strokes and see how the texture and the light bounce off the gesso and has a reflection and a glossiness and a matte in some other areas, yet these things move.”
Ultimately, this “kind of close-up magic and everything is another thing we haven’t gotten to do anywhere else in the world because we haven’t had to have things work that close up.” The Haunted Mansion Parlor allowed the Imagineering team to try many different things, something that Joseph described as a dream but also encouraging for future projects.
“As far as the techniques we were able to come up with and invent for this parlor, it’s really things that we get to build upon for other things going forward,” explained Joseph. Still, most importantly, he and the eight others who were on the project from inception to its unveiling were all huge Haunted Mansion fans and “huge Imagineering history fans,” so that passion is “ “imbued in the space and the richness of it all.”
The bar is also home to secrets, mainly the mirror behind it. As the attraction runs through its eight chapters, you’ll see folks like Madame Leota potentially appear, and you might do a double take.
These reflections aren’t CGI, and that’s by design. “We absolutely shied away from using any CGI to do that,” said Joseph, “because, as you know, the mansion opened in 1969 [and] it’s a very analog show, which is what all of us love about it, really.’ So rather than use a computer, Joseph and his team opted for a ‘really high ISO camera’ operating at a very high resolution and filmed the animatronics from Haunted Mansion at Disneyland.
“We got like footage, like has never been gotten before, of these amazing audio-animatronics, and then, of course, added in post, a little bit of glow around it. But the figures from the attraction are what you see in that mirror, and they’re so hyper, high resolution, hyper-real,” explained Joseph. And that all adds to the richness, attention to detail, and immersion the Haunted Mansion Parlor provides. Sure, most Disney rides don’t have a built-in bar, but the Parlor is as much a true Disney attraction as a ride, and it’s one where you get to pick your seat.
It’s also one that Joseph, the wider Imagineering team, and Disney are immensely proud of – and one that I desperately want to see IRL. Still, Joseph hinted there’s more to come:
“Just a couple of weeks ago, we all said, this is the beginning of this level of richness and storytelling of a land-based attraction on a Disney Ship. So we’re hoping that this is the start of more things like this and really bridging out our stories even further into things we’ve never imagined before.”
I certainly can’t wait.
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